On June 5, 1956, Elvis Presley helped change the attitude and sexuality of rock ‘n’ roll with a performance that left the media warning “beware of Elvis Presley,” critics and Catholics clutching their pearls, and Elvis fans buzzing with an excitement they had never felt from music prior to that fateful evening. Presley’s career was already well in the midst of its upswing at the time. But his appearance on the Milton Berle Show increased his stardom tenfold.
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After all, if years of American history have proven anything, telling the general public that something is “bad” or “scandalous” will only pique their interest further. And that was undoubtedly true of Elvis.
The 1956 Elvis Performance That Changed His Career Forever
One only needs to take a quick glance at a young Elvis Presley to know why he was natural star material. With his heartbreaker looks, Southern charm, and an enthralling, warbling croon, it didn’t take long for his early records to become popular among young music listeners. By the mid-1950s, Presley had released several successful singles and appeared on television multiple times, including on the Milton Berle Show. But it would be Presley’s June 1956 performance on that program that would change the trajectory of his career forever. He was no longer just the crooner. He was a hip gyrater, too, and audiences found the latter to be even more shocking and exciting.
Unlike his previous appearances on the Milton Berle Show, Presley didn’t perform with a guitar in early June 1956. Instead, he channeled all his energy into shaking his legs, swinging his hips, and addressing the audience with a half-smile, half-snarl. The future King of Rock ‘n’ Roll performed what would become one of his most iconic tracks, “Hound Dog,” which he released one month later in July 1956. Footage of the audience shows onlookers smiling and clapping. Despite what seemed to be a positive reception on the show, the press the following day was hardly as supportive.
Jack Gould of the New York Times had a particularly biting review, writing, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore. His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway. The gyration never had anything to do with the world of popular music and still doesn’t. America, a Catholic weekly publication, wrote in their headline, “Beware of Elvis Presley,” per History.
Bringing A Previously Overlooked Dance Style Into The Mainstream
Elvis Presley certainly wasn’t the first person to wiggle their hips to a rocking blues number. His place as the figurehead of this dance style is largely due to the segregation of American society in the mid-1950s. In a pre-Civil Rights Movement country, white and Black music, culture, and style were kept separate in theory. Black artists were often overlooked for their white counterparts, who were taking cues from the Black artists in the first place.
Presley, a white man from Mississippi, brought this bold, impassioned dancing style to the mainstream. Not unlike the Black artists who pioneered this on-stage attitude, the older, more conservative general public reacted to Presley with condemnation, judgment, and pearl-clutching horror. But the rest of the country—the ones who screamed, fawned, and ogled over the hip-shaking, pompadoured Presley that fateful performance in 1956—showed their feelings for the King of Rock and Roll loud and clear.
Photo by The Legacy Collection/THA/Shutterstock
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